Pain/pleasure, censure/praise,  gain loss, fame/insignificance, as I was considering the polarity of the worldly conditions, it dawned on me that their pairings are inevitable; they will always come together, unbreakably linked for all time. The reason is simple — whatever has the ability to move in one direction has the ability to move in the other: If something can accumulate it can dissipate, if it can grow it can whither, the quality that allows for gain is the same quality that allows for loss. Everything is this way, it is baked into the fabric of this world.

I was looking at my favorite yellow purse, starting to fray a bit at the seams, and I realized I could consider the physical world in terms of pairings as well, in terms of coming together and moving apart. My purse is an aggregation of parts, a zipper, leather, strings, nylon, bottlecaps, by definition the fact that it had the ability to come together means it has the ability to come apart. That is the nature of all 4e objects. My body is the same way, a compilation of skin and sinew and organs and cells, they come together in a certain form, for a time, and then the parts disaggregate. Through this body I experience both pleasure and pain; the same mechanisms — the same neuropathways and brain functions, the ability of all those little neurons and signals to aggregate and disaggregate in particular ways — that allow for pleasure under one circumstance are the very mechanisms that facilitate pain in another.

My problem is that I want pleasure and not pain. I want a purse that is together not falling apart, I want a body whose aggregation is young and fit and healthy. I want beautiful not ugly.  But opposites are built into the nature of each up/down. States that I find preferable all depend on circumstances, and we live in a world where circumstances continuously change, so how could states not follow suite?

In one circumstance a purse or an Alana body are whole and in another they start coming apart.  That is normal.  Which makes me start wondering… maybe what is abnormal is me. More specifically, my expectation that stuff (both material and immaterial) that is part of an eternally bound pair, would only ever show the side of the pair that I prefer. Maybe my suffering isn’t really normal either: There is no particular value built into either side of a pair –heads or tails, a quarter is just a quarter — I only suffer if I am rooting for heads and tails come-up. In other words, I am the cause of my own suffering, I have normalized it, taken for granted that it is just a part of my life, but it doesn’t really have to be; if I can just abandon my preferences/desires that cause the suffering in the first place…man the Buddha was really on to something…